My favorite English teacher could draw humor out of the driest material. It wasn’t forced on us either. He took Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, Addison’s essays, and many other literary wonders from the eighteenth century and made them hilarious, even at eight o’clock in the morning. The thing that amazed me most was that the first time I read these works on my own some of them seemed dead, but the second time, after his explanation, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t seen the humor. The stories and poems and plays were suddenly filled with allusions(典故) and irony and hilarious moments. I learned more from him than from any other teacher.
My least favorite English teacher also made people laugh. Some students found him to be wonderfully funny. Many others did not. He assigned journals over a six week period, to be written in every day. At the end of the six weeks I had a notebook full of bits and pieces about my ideas, short stories, reactions to what we had read, and so on. Our teacher announced that we would be grading each other’s journals. Mine was passed to Joe, that class clown, who always behaved in a funny or silly way. He saw it fit to make joke of and said, “This writing isn’t fit to line the bottom of a birdcage.” Our teacher laughed at that funny remark. It hurt me so much that the anger from it has driven my writing and teaching ever since.
So what makes the difference? Humor is one of the most powerful tools teachers or writers have. It can build up students and classes and make them excited about literature and writing, or it can tear them apart. It is true that humor is either productive or counter-productive and self-defeating.
24. The passage mainly discusses _____.
A. teaching B. literature C. humor D. knowledge
25. The underlined word “hilarious” in Paragraph 1 probably means _____.
A. funny B. tiring C. inspiring D. brilliant
26. With his favorite English teacher, the writer found it most amazing that _____.
A. his teacher was very learned
B. his teacher was very humorous
C. the works by Johnson and Addison were very humorous
D. few were able to find humor in works by Johnson and others
27. The English teacher the writer disliked most _____.
A. was not able to make students laugh B. hurt his students’ feelings
C. didn’t let his students do the grading D. had no sense of humor